QLA Design is proud to announce that the Made In Brownsville initiative will be taking up a semester long residency in the Harvard Innovation Lab Venture Incubation Program. This is an exciting two years young program that supports entrepreneurs in developing and nurturing their ideas with a state-of-the-art co-working space, access to workshops, rapid prototyping technologies, professional legal and consulting practitioners. Its also just a great place to meet other visionaries across Harvard’s many schools.

Made In Brownsville is a storefront creative solutions makerspace and think tank based in a Brooklyn neighborhood with the highest concentration of public housing in the nation. What makes us unique is our place-based employment model that targets the most at-risk population in New York; 16-24 year old juvenile offenders. This tech-innovation opportunity leverages the latent social capital of an eager workforce to increase their marketability, with the rapid prototyping tools and technologies driving Brooklyn’s tinkerer movement. We facilitate their investment back into their own community through visual advocacy while empowering them with tools to change their own narrative, as well as Brownsville’s.

The goal for this semesters’ residency in the i-Lab will be building the infrastructure of the business model which includes but is not limited to:

business plan development

legal structure

market analysis

product brainstorming/prototyping

Board development

We have dubbed the synergy between the Innovation Lab and the Made In Brownsville thought partners as #InnovateBrownsville. Some of the #InnovateBrownsville Team

Several individuals will be supporting in satellite locations. We invite all those interested in participating to contact us. We’re looking forward to a productive semester of building on the hope that lives in Brownsville. Follow the hashtag #InnovateBrownsville on social media to see the exciting developments over the course of the i-Lab residency.